"I have known him since I was 19-years-old and James Brown had me speak on Soul Train," he said. "He brought soul music and dance to the world in a way that it had never been shown and he was a cultural game changer on a global level. Had it not been for Don Cornelius we would not have ever transcended from the Chitlin circuit to become mainstream cultural trendsetters."

According to the press release, Mr. Brown conducted the interview with Mr. Vick earlier today in Virginia. The interview will air as part of a broader story on 60 Minutes this coming Sunday.

More from the release:

The segment will also include interviews with Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the U.S., the country’s largest organization dedicated to the protection of animals.   Tony Dungy, the former NFL coach who will be a special advisor to Vick, will also be interviewed.

Described by the pair as a "women's mag that appeals to men," the first issue--which will be distributed for free this Thursday at 50 record shops, bars, boutiques and clubs in London and New York--includes a column by British Socialist Tony Benn, prank ("wind-up" in British!) calls to the right-wing British National Party, Ms. Geldof's interviews with Vivienne Westwood and Pete Doherty, fashion shoots, and "lots of new bands." Composed of 120 pages and no advertising, Issue 0 is meant to be a "taster" for the quarterly, ad-funded Issue 1, which is due in March 2009.

As for her inspiration, Ms. Geldof cites a bunch of European magazines we don't know (Heat? Dazed & Confused?) along with Vice (uh-o) and NME.

"This is basically my job," she told the newspaper. "This is the main focus of my energies...I want it to be a blank canvas for young talent - whether that's writers, photographers, graphic designers, artists or the bands and designers that we cover."

But don't let that fool you into thinking that the precocious Ms. Geldof doesn't know her indie history! Mr. Brown told the interviewer "My main criterion was - if I've heard of it, it probably shouldn't go in. I had doubts about interviewing Billy Childish because he's been around for such a long time, but Peaches said he was Kurt Cobain's big influence and we should feature him, so we did." 

The weakened state of the print industry was clearly not a deterrent for the two, who explained that "This first issue cost less than three first-class flights to New York." As if that comparison weren't enough to remind you of who you're dealing with, The Gaurdian was sure to point out that "Geldof, Brown, and [manager and partial owner Andy] Varley have plenty of other work and are not relying on the magazine for their income. Brown is understood to have made a fortune from the sale of IFG and works as a consultant, while Geldof makes money modelling and laughs at her agent's £300 haircuts."

At 11 a.m. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and club owners announce new night life safety measures at City Hall.

Also at 11 a.m. a George W. Bush impersonator holds a news conference at 354 West 45th St.

And from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m James Brown lies in state at the Apollo Theater.

-- Azi Paybarah

Midlake is a quintet from the talent-incubator town of Denton, Tex. Their newly released sophomore LP, The Trials of Van Occupanther (Bella Union), achieves a sophisticated balance of past and present. It boasts the kind of serious songwriting, arranging and instrumental chops that hark back to the heyday of the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills & Nash—a mellow moment before punk made proficiency taboo. The album is full of lush, resonant acoustic guitars and warmly overdriven electrics, lilting pianos and vintage keyboards, soaring vocal melodies paired with honeyed harmony parts and orchestral touches.

Yet it never succumbs to the slickness or blandness that can plague the genre. That’s probably because the band adopted the indie-rock approach, playing virtually all of the instruments and producing the album themselves. With its complex arrangements and dense layers of overdubs, The Trials of Van Occupanther has a rich, organic ensemble feel.

Lead singer and songwriter Tim Smith’s supple, mellifluous tenor could easily be exploited for operatic gestures, but he’s careful not to hog the spotlight. There are wailing, honest-to-goodness, classic-rock drum fills and guitar solos, most notably in the infectious “Head Home,” but they fall in all the right places, supporting rather than overwhelming the songs. It all adds up to a generous rush of feeling, conjuring up a pleasant (sometimes gloomy) place to get lost.

Lyrically, it’s an eccentric vision. Mr. Smith evokes an invented past much more distant than the Me Decade, painting a landscape of hillsides and forests populated by villagers and hunters. “Roscoe,” the propulsive and hypnotic lead track, imagines rural life at the end of the 19th century; the first verse is about mountaineers traveling far to fix someone’s leaking roof (an odd motif that reoccurs later in the album).

Like many of the songs, “Bandits” doesn’t follow an easily identifiable verse-chorus structure, but it’s an immediately poignant and engaging mid-tempo ballad. Mr. Smith asks, “Did you ever want to roam around with bandits, / To see many places and hide in ditches?” Then he tempers that romantic image of the carefree outsider, singing, “It’s not always easy,” before invoking the need to find shelter when the winter comes.

These are fairy tales minus the happy ending (most just trail off without concluding at all). In “Van Occupanther,” the title character is a shy scientist who’s shunned by his neighbors. He seems on the brink of revealing an important discovery, but instead cries out (to gorgeous harmonies), “Let me not be too consumed with this world.” And in “Chasing After Deer,” an affectingly artless description of tragic, unrequited love, a deer, frightened of a pursuer who’s already given up the chase, runs headlong off a cliff into the sea. It’s that kind of mixed emotion—a compound of sadness and beauty—that Midlake captures on this quietly stunning record.

—I-Huei Go

LIKE JOHNNY CASH'S FIFTH VOLUME OF THE American series, another of this year’s finest albums, Ali Farka Touré’s Savane, was released posthumously (Touré, who was in his late 60’s, died in March). But if Cash’s last record is a collection of casket lullabies, the Malian guitarist’s final songs have a teeming lushness—a lively, organic beauty—that makes it difficult to imagine that he was suffering from bone cancer when he recorded them.

Touré’s crystalline guitar buoys his music, even on gluey, hot-sun hymns like “Ledi Coumbe,” or on the funereal title track. But nothing here floats by sadly: These songs knead together that pristine guitar with heart-grabbing harmonies, slender instrumental echo and bucolic percussion. This is an album of pure molasses melody. It’s intoxicating because of its wide landscape: The panorama created by Touré and his collaborators is verdant yet dignified and demure. Its yogic reiterations evoke the splendor of Lee (Scratch) Perry’s dub reggae, yet this album matches the dreamy lilt of dub without the nuisance of nonstop reverb or tyrannical bass lines.

Not a single note here oversteps its bounds, even when the tracks add a second guitar—or a choir of wiry n’goni lutes. By filling the spaces behind and beneath one another, these musicians build up limited alternations on slow themes into electric crescendos.

Touré has been memorialized as “the Bluesman of Africa”—but that nickname backwardly confuses which hemisphere the genre’s roots grew in. Savane is not the stuff of wannabe Delta barroom blues, and it’s not hard to hear why.

Touré is best known for 1994’s Talking Timbuktu, his Desert Island Disc–worthy collaboration with Ry Cooder, the Californian slide-guitar divinity. Like Mr. Cooder’s more popular international collaborations with Buena Vista Social Club, Timbuktu is immediately likeable for its swaggeringly pretty hooks.

The prettiness of Savane is much less important than its lastingly beautiful craftwork: The caramelized growl of Little George Sueref’s harmonica on the opener, “Erdi,” melts into the quintuplet vocal harmonies of “Machengoidi” and “Soko Yhinka”; vintage James Brown bandleader Pee Wee Ellis plays a late-night barfly tenor sax on “Beto” to match the translucent flute of “Banga”; on “N’Jarou”, the album’s last and most magnetic track, Touré’s stately acoustic soloing hypnotizes the brass and African lutes beneath it.

His guitar—sometimes a crisp acoustic, sometimes a crisper electric—has often done the talking for him. But Touré’s languid charcoal vocals on Savane are a weighty addition. Though the lyrics are sung in Malian dialect, with a few gushes of French, only jealous Anglophones will be disappointed. The vocals are so melodious and percussive that it’s a pleasure listening to them merely as abstract expressions of emotion. At their core, Touré’s velvety moans and elderly grumbles are never unintelligible. Muddiness has never sounded clearer.

His singing is always eloquent, but the flickers of spoken incantation on “N’Jarou” are supreme. These vocals dance above an ebullient seven-note guitar riff, which eventually relaxes into free-flowing improvisation. Contrasted against the airy, paced breaths of Pee Wee Ellis’ tenor saxophone, the alternating outbursts of voice and guitar are cataclysmic.

To insist that any such piece of music has its own inherently global and globalizing voice is the stuff of colonialist choir teachers: Touré’s music isn’t fratty or gleeful enough to be universal. Nonetheless, he reportedly sang in all three dialects of northern Mali as a gesture of unity.

There’s something in Savane’s transcendent Malian songs that demands hyperbole: Its quiet jangle blossoms into pure elegance, getting richer and lovelier as it rolls along.

—Max Abelson

It's a strange but true phenomenon that some of the most progressive and downright weird music these days is sitting at the top of the charts. Thanks to the competitive nature of both hip-hop and R&B, the Billboard Hot 100 can read like a who's who of futuristic experimentalism and composerly sophistication. If you're not convinced, listen–really listen –to the spacey Eastern minimalism of Timbaland's production on Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On," or the Neptunes' use of negative space on smashes for such rappers as Jay-Z and Mystikal. Granted, a song called "Shake Ya Ass" is bound to leave some of us wanting. But it's pretty clear that something's going on.

Destiny's Child is a big part of that something. They shot up as one of the biggest acts in pop with 1999's The Writing's on the Wall , thanks in part to the novel coupling of their "Bills, Bills, Bills" single with TLC's bitches-with-bankrolls hit "No Scrubs." But it was the herky-jerky rhythms and diamond-cut production of songs such as "Bugaboo," "Jumpin' Jumpin'" and "Say My Name" that made Houston's hottest harmonizers something more than just hitmakers.

The Writing's on the Wall gained Destiny's Child an audience far outside the MTV faithful. In a memorable piece in The Village Voice , critic Frank Kogan compared the group's attempt to sing with, not just over, the fractured rhythms of contemporary R&B to James Brown's funk free-for-alls of the 60's and 70's. A trip to the East Village record store Mondo Kim's at the time produced an equally memorable picture of a hipster clerk pleading with a coworker as he blared "Bugaboo" and tried to convince his sneering peer that the song was amazing, "if you really listen to it." He lost his argument, but still …

Part of the draw is that there is an emotional component to Destiny's Child that's as sophisticated as anything they cook up at the production board. And God knows they had plenty of emotional tools to work with on their new album, Survivor (Columbia). The group spent the last year ditching original members and adding new ones, while leader Beyoncé Knowles entertained her every control-freak fantasy by the side of her even-more-controlling father, Mathew Knowles. It's a web of intrigue that would require a subscription to Vibe and lots of spare time to understand fully. But it's enough to know that, in true diva fashion, it's become Destiny's Child vs. the world these days.

However, the macro-level conflicts are a lot less interesting than the micro-level ones that play out in their songs. Take the first single, which gives the album both its name and its shameless tie-in with a certain TV show. If you can push aside the countless times you've heard it standing in line at Duane Reade, "Survivor" is an awfully enticing song. The backing track is a crystalline mix of eerily cutting strings, over-caffeinated breakbeats and a liquid bass line that does a wondrously melting thing under the chorus' soaring call-and-response.

Lyrically, the song is pretty dumb ("I'm not gonna dis you on the Internet, cuz my momma taught me better than that," etc.). But the group's singing saves the day. Destiny's Child is that rare outfit whose melismatic gymnastics rarely fail to service what they're singing about. There's an ambiguous undercurrent to their muscular harmonizing that makes it sound hurt, or at least scarred. For all its chest-pounding, independent-woman theatrics, the chorus ("I'm a survivor, I'm not gonna give up") sounds as much like fragile self-affirmation as any truly believable conviction.

It's dangerous to read too much into a Destiny's Child song, but this kind of push-and-pull happens too consistently to ignore. On "Dangerously in Love," they dig into the tension between love and infatuation with melodies that rise and fall in line with the throb of their moody instability. They're wide-eyed in love in one moment; three words later, they're fearful of falling in too deep.

As good as it is in certain moments, Survivor is nowhere near as consistent as The Writing's on the Wall , which held up unusually well as a real, capital-A album. This time out, Ms. Knowles took the writing and production reins from the superstar confab–Kevin (She'kspere) Briggs and Rodney Jerkins, among them–that gave the last album its sparkle. She shines in some moments (the choral interlude in "Independent Women Part 1"; the impossibly busy mix of "Happy Face"; the sheer sonic insanity of "Independent Women Part 2"). But she also falls flat on her face, often in the space of those same songs.

The album's slapped-together feel isn't exactly helped by the preposterous "Gospel Medley," the album-ending "Outro"'s almost comical self-celebration, or the opening track's shout-out to "Lucy Liu, Drew and Cameron D.," who commissioned the song for use in Charlie's Angels .

Survivor is most decidedly a mixed bag. Depending on how much you want to listen , it holds out plenty of moments worth trolling for. Just keep the bag close by so you can throw the bad ones back.

–Andy Battaglia

Afrika Bambaataa: The Body Electro

It's impossible to examine the oeuvre of hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa without running smack into the sweaty Sansabelt slacks of James Brown. The Godfather of Soul's name is repeated mantra-like near the end of the "Bronx Version" of Mr. Bambaataa's landmark 1980 single, "Zulu Nation Throwdown," a chant that was used by Tom Tom Club for "Genius of Love." And he collaborated with Mr. Bambaataa to record the memorably silly single, "Unity Part 1 (The Third Coming)," which had Mr. Brown shouting, "Punk rock! New Wave! Peace!"

And as Looking for the Perfect Beat 1980-1985 (Tommy Boy)–a new and necessary collection of those and other 12-inch singles–reveals, Mr. Bambaataa has earned himself a place near Mr. Brown in the pantheon of urban-culture kingpins, a trailblazer who has done for rap culture what Margaret Sanger did for contraception.

Yet, for all of their collaboration and mutual admiration (as much as Mr. Brown mutually admires anybody), Mr. Bambaataa's and Mr. Brown's respective constructs of funk have little in common. Indeed, perhaps more than any other African-American in music history, Mr. Bambaataa has steered the genre away from the polyrhythmic intensity exemplified by Mr. Brown's music and toward something more Germanic and stiff-kneed.

Which is why Mr. Bambaataa has recently found a greater embrace among the house and techno fields. He collaborated with the electronic acts Leftfield and Uberzone, and appeared in a video for U.N.K.L.E., an ensemble which, despite the presence of D.J. Shadow, has as much to do with hip-hop as George Lincoln Rockwell did with Nietzsche.

Not that Mr. Bambaataa didn't play a key role in the creation of hip-hop. As one of the most influential D.J.'s on radio at the turn of the 80's, he would follow Mr. Brown with Giorgio Moroder and the art-school no-wave of Liquid Liquid. It was on WHBI's Zulu Beats , which Mr. Bambaataa shared with a number of other D.J.'s, where hip-hop forefather Grandmaster Flash first heard Liquid Liquid's "Cavern" bass line, which became the basis for his 12-inch single "White Lines"–and a massive lawsuit. (This period has been documented on the live Death Mix: First Mix Recordings on the Japanese import-only P-Vine label.)

When it came time for Mr. Bambaataa to release his own 12-inch, it was, at least initially, funkier than a lot of the music he was spinning. "Zulu Nation Throwdown" and both versions of "Jazzy Sensation" (with Soul Sonic Force and the Jazzy 5, respectively), which all can be found on Perfect Beat , featured a crew of rappers who exuded the kind of casual camaraderie that went a long way toward helping rap cross over to the mainstream. The music is deep, off-the-cuff funk, utterly removed from the disco of the time, and the rhymes already show a social consciousness more sophisticated than the "Hotel Motel Holiday Inn" stylings that were prevalent then.

But classic as those singles are, they were not where Mr. Bambaataa would make his mark. With 1982's "Planet Rock" and the Tommy Boy compilation's title track, "Looking for the Perfect Beat," Mr. Bambaataa forged the electro sound–with its Linn drum fills and dinka-dinka beatbox–that, for better or worse, became the bedrock of an endless stream of 80's music (at least that which wasn't connected to Jon Bon Jovi).

The riffs were essentially ripped from Kraftwerk, but the message was very different. "When we say life you know that life has meaning"–from "Planet Rock"–is not a lesson normally associated with the Robo-Teutons who imagined a dystopia of Man Machines. To the contrary, Mr. Bambaataa was planting the seeds for the sort of socially edged uplift that would become more strident as the 80's–that most strident of decades–wore on.

"Renegades of Funk," built on a synthesized filch from Mr. Brown's "Give It Up or Turn It Loose," connected African-American cultural heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. to a larger concept of "the funk" back before such ideas were cynically played to death.

These tracks are not masterpieces, and are often a little crass ("Perfect Beat" contains an entire section of Fairlight riffs on national anthems). But in 1980, before the money started flooding hip-hop, ghetto optimism was still an ideal untainted by the poses of the world's P. Diddys.

But after its initial ubiquity (especially with early L.A. gangsta rappers), electro has had considerably more effect on house, techno, ghetto-tech, 2Step, booty bass–practically every new music to come down the pike except hip-hop. With his Kraft-werkian eclecticism, it's difficult not to see Mr. Bambaataa's fingerprints all over a techno visionary such as Carl Craig, while his influence on the current rap scene, except as a symbolic elder, is practically nil.

Mr. Bambaataa seemed to sense that he was a man out of time by 1984's "Who Do You Think You're Funkin' With," one of the first it-was-better-back-in-the-old-days raps. There also aren't too many D.J.'s who would brag about spinning Falco, but Mr. Bambaataa continues to do so–and, strangely, this curious continental approach has kept him current. Mr. Bambaataa continues to travel the world circuit, D.J.'ing for ridiculous sums (you can hear a recent set on the so-so Mixer magazine CD Electro Funk Breakdown ). He remains turntablism's great eclectic. Whether this is such a great thing is open to debate, but who would deny the sentiment?

–D. Strauss

"I don't have to work," said the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business, James Brown. "I don't have to make some payments next month, or pay the electrical bill, gas bill or whatever. That's been taken care of many, many years ago. I let my gut feeling make decisions."

Mr. Brown's gut had him in town on Nov. 10, the eve of a two-night stand at B.B. King's nightclub in the heart of refurbished Times Square. And why not? New York has always held a charm for the man who invented the enduring, heavy-on-the-downbeat dance music called funk. Just last month, Mr. Brown shared the stage with Lenny Kravitz at the 2000 VH1 /Vogue Fashion Awards at the theater at Madison Square Garden. Twenty years ago, the half-forgotten performer sparked a comeback at the old Lone Star Café on East 13th Street. And back in 1962, Mr. Brown recorded his career-defining road show on 125th Street in Harlem. The resulting document, Live at the Apollo , remains his highest-charting album ever.

"New York is made up of the little things that meant something–Birdland, Lone Star and all of that!" Mr. Brown exclaimed. But, he said, "what's special in New York is the Apollo Theater. It contributed to a whole race of people–then it contributed to all the young people, who wanted to know where the music came from."

Mr. Brown was wearing a gray suit, a bright purple shirt open at the collar and black suede boots with silver tips. His hair was processed, and his eyebrows were painted on. In a coarse voice roughened by those signature screams and gut-punched exhortations, he talked of his legacy–occasionally referring to himself in the third person–and his upcoming shows.

"Now see, most entertainers won't work in another entertainer's place. But this is B.B. King's, he's a very good friend of mine," Mr. Brown said. "So I'd be happy to play his place anytime and let the people see James Brown and know what a good time is."

Up close, the 67-year-old Mr. Brown looks more the Grandfather than the Godfather of Soul. But his rapid repartee and exuberance contradict the wrinkles and slight paunch brought on by a half-century of shows and tours. He is acutely aware of his pervasive influence on contemporary hip-hop ("Well, rap came from me …") and yet bemoans an unfortunate lack of originality in today's music. Asked how he feels when he hears a James Brown sample spicing a current rap hit, Mr. Brown told Manhattan Music: "Those samples are extensions of me. I'm proud of them, because now I get paid."

Still, Mr. Brown said, "I'm not proud of the stigma it leaves. I'm not proud of the fact that there's no new music. I got kids and grandkids and great-grandkids … [and] we don't want them to come back with no music. They can't be nothing but robbers."

Mr. Brown is an ex-con twice over: first for petty theft as a teenager, and in 1989 for various violent and drug-related offenses. He is now born-again. Praises to God punctuate his conversation. His manager is his pastor, who accompanies him on his travels. And his religion influences his business decisions, such as who gets to quote from timeless funk anthems like "I Feel Good" or "Hot Pants."

"I get about 125 to 150 different inquiries every day on the catalog, for publishing rights, from around the world," Mr. Brown said. "The first thing I look for is, if it's [related to] alcohol or tobacco or pornography or violence, then my office disapproves it no matter how much it pays."

For example, he continued, "Will Smith wanted to use my stuff, a sample for a song, and it would have made it so big, and it would have made us a lot of money … but we didn't like the song." Then there was Chris Rock. "I know his mother," Mr. Brown said. Still, he turned the comic down because "the profanity is what he chose to do."

A gospel sensibility has always informed Mr. Brown's music. His shows still shake with the uplifting charge of a prayer meeting, and his roots go back to a time when rock 'n' roll, soul and funk were part of the same Southern musical brew coming out of juke joints and churches.

"Me, I was hard gospel–jubilee. Ray Charles was also in that," Mr. Brown said. "You know, jubilee is rap." Then he sang a few lines of proof: "Well, God spoke to Jonah–he's a Christian man / Said 'Gotta go down,' he want to save the land. / Jonah didn't want to do what God command / Got him a ticket out of the gospel land."

On Friday night Mr. Brown's faithful made B.B. King's cavernous basement room a shoulder-to-shoulder pressure cooker. Tables and chairs had been removed for a sold-out crowd including veteran soul fans from uptown, teenage funk acolytes and two generations in between. Expectations were high, and Mr. Brown did not disappoint.

At 9 p.m. sharp, the Soul Generals, Mr. Brown's 16-piece, neatly uniformed group–including two drummers, two bassists and three guitarists–broke into a brief number that brought the Bittersweets, his four backup singers, to the stage. Then, clad in a white tuxedo, M.C. Danny Ray–Mr. Brown's perennial sidekick–exclaimed those now-immortal words: "And right about now it is … star time!"

Mr. Brown kicked off in high gear and, over the next 90 minutes, seamlessly weaved one familiar funk motif into another (I counted only four pauses during the entire show). In the first 20 minutes alone, he performed "Get Up Offa That Thing," "Cold Sweat," "Popcorn" and "Gonna Have a Funky Good Time."

No matter that Mr. Brown's gravity-defying splits have been reduced to the occasional stage-spin or microphone-play. His rhythmic accuracy is still perfect, and the mere suggestion of a strut, slide or camel-walk elicited gasps and screams. The applause only subsided as Mr. Brown ceded the mike to two less-than-stellar protegées: Janis Joplin copycat Tomi Rae Hynie, and later Spanish rapper Sara Raya.

But then, what is the James Brown Revue without the "Revue"? It's as much a part of the act as his final routine. While singing "Please, Please, Please," Mr. Brown fell to his knees as Mr. Ray draped a sparkling green cape over his shoulders and led him upstage. As he has done countless times with feigned drama, Mr. Brown threw off the cloak and rushed back to sing; the crowd roared. An extended version of "Sex Machine" pushed the show to its climax, and the singer departed, sweat-drenched and smiling.

The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business? Believe it. Approaching a youthful 70, Mr. Brown's got the timecard to prove it.

– Ashley Kahn

Ashley Kahn is author of the just published Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo).

Cashed Out

When Johnny Cash recorded his Rick Rubin-shepherded American Recordings (American) in 1994, country music was undergoing a sea change it hadn't seen since countrypolitan reared its pomaded head around 1960. Thanks to Soundscan, record companies had finally been put on notice that if they didn't start recording acts that sounded like the Eagles, they may as well close up their Nashville divisions. Scores of country legends who had previously benefited from benign neglect–the Waylons, the Merles and, for God's sake, even the Willies–found themselves homeless or, at best, on the road again.

Ironically (but logically), the only folk who cared enough to do something about this were the rock royalty that country previously had no use for, but who had been avidly following the bad-boy images of these totemic stars since childhood. So Waylon Jennings fixed himself up with Don Was, Tammy Wynette did the "Justified and Ancient" thing with the K.L.F., and under Def Jam founder Mr. Rubin's protective wing, Mr. Cash recorded as sublime a country record as was released in the 90's with just a quavery voice, an acoustic guitar and contributions from the likes of metal god Glenn Danzig.

It worked, even if it didn't sell. Mr. Rubin's bourgeois danger jones gained legitimacy, and the work of clever songwriters such as Nick Lowe garnered emotional authenticity when interpreted by the Man in Black (who evidently didn't hold a grudge over the Carlene Carter marriage fiasco). And Mr. Cash himself–a religious but honestly conflicted man–contributed some of his darkest songs in decades.

But then Mr. Rubin began to push his luck. 1996's follow-up, Unchained (reportedly recorded at the same sessions) featured Mr. Rubin's Los Angeles party buddies, the Heartbreakers and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, backing up Mr. Cash, and the results are anonymous and lack propulsive bite.

Since then, Mr. Cash's health has slowly slipped away from him (as has the health of Mr. Rubin's now-Sony-affiliated label), but here we have American III: Solitary Man (American), a grab bag of both solo and accompanied tracks that initially gives the impression that this might be an odds and sods from last decade's sessions.

That is, until you listen to the singing, which appears to be of recent vintage. Mr. Cash's always limited range and hurly-burly pitch seems to have been reduced from A-F to A-C. In theory, this should pose no problem for the listener; Mr. Cash was always more Morrissey than Freddie Mercury. But although Solitary Man isn't a vocal embarrassment on the scale of Ray Price's comeback album this year, neither does it possess the rough-hewn tragic glory of Billie Holiday's late-period Lady in Satin . So a song that might seem ready for a radical rethinking, such as U2's "One" (with its glorious original arrangement and idiotic lyrics) ends up losing on both ends.

And what of Neil Diamond's title track? Mr. Cash's solo rendition doesn't sound entirely comfortable. Despite his triumph three decades earlier with Bob Dylan's less sophisticated outlaw paean, "Wanted Man," Mr. Diamond–like Messrs. Cash and Dylan, a Columbia Records superstar in the 1970s–is something of the obverse of Mr. Cash. The pleasures of Mr. Diamond's early work were obscured by his silly pretensions and considerable hubris. Mr. Cash, on the other hand, added gravitas to quite a few pieces of mariachi-fueled tripe in his time. Sometimes he sounded embarrassed, but often he elevated them. At least he was never defeated by the material.

Mr. Cash prevails once again on Solitary Man , even if the often-interesting material here isn't exactly improved by his interpretation or his performance. Nothing against Nick Cave–who, like Mr. Diamond and Mr. Danzig, was underrated as a songwriter in his prime–but "Mercy Seat" was originally an attempt to reach the heights (or depths) of Mr. Cash's greatest work.

Of course, every interpreter needs new material, and you could make a case that the new Tin Pan Alley dresses in black and hangs out at the Viper Room. Still, dressing an aging, ailing legend in the clothing of Nick Cave is just ass-backwards.

–D. Strauss

Occupied Willson-Piper

When Marty Willson-Piper played Luna Lounge for the CMJ Music Festival back in October, he finished the gig feeling a little unsatisfied. Mr. Willson-Piper, 42, is a guy who likes to keep busy. In addition to being the guitarist of the long-running atmospheric Australian rock band, the Church, and a guitarist-vocalist for the British shoe-gazer group All About Eve, Mr. Willson-Piper recently released a solo album, Hanging Out in Heaven (Heyday), which he was plugging at CMJ.

Anyway, Mr. Willson-Piper, who grew up in Merseyside in northern England, compared putting together and rehearsing a band for a single show to "meeting Nastassja Kinski, having sex with her once–her really enjoying it, you really enjoying it–and then you never seeing her again."

Hence, Mr. Willson-Piper has been releasing a little of that pent-up energy via a couple of additional shows in town. He will perform an electric set at Maxwell's in Hoboken, N.J., on Nov. 16, with the band who accompanied him at Luna Lounge: drummer Linda Pitmon and bassist Dave DeCastro of Steve Wynn's quartet (Mr. Wynn, formerly of Dream Syndicate–not the casino business–will also perform that night.) Mr. Willson-Piper also noted that the other members of the Church are in town mixing the band's next album, which is slated to be released next year. In a perfect world, they would show up and join Mr. Willson-Piper on stage. So would Ms. Kinski.

– Frank DiGiacomo